[OpenAFS] AFS/UNIX attributes, installing AFS piecemeal, and AFS on XFS

[John Gruenenfelder]

After having read much of the AFS documentation I have decided that it will
work out very well for our small cluster for our data drives and perhaps home
and mail.

1) After reading the sections on how AFS handles UNIX file attributes, I am
still a little uncertain as to how it behaves.  In particular, some of the
docs read as though most of the UNIX file attributes are ignored for files,
since ACLs are at the directory level.

This would be of concern in home directories.  For example, in $HOME/.ssh
there are files which must be readable by all (public key) and others which
must not be publicly readable (private key).  This can't be handled by
directory level ACLs and needs the UNIX permissions instead.  I'm assuming
this must work on AFS home dirs, but the docs were confusing.  Does it work?


2) When I install AFS, I would like to do the install piecemeal.  By this I
mean that I would prefer to install and configure Kerberos first and get it
working.  Once that is done, then I would like to install AFS.  I know AFS
makes heavy use of Kerberos, so I just want to make sure this route is
doable.  Can I perform such an install?


3) Lastly, I have seen conflicting information about whether the XFS
filesystem can be used underneath AFS.  One document, in the AFSLore Wiki
website, says that XFS *has* been used successfully for the AFS cache on IRIX
systems.  I am running on x86 platforms.  However, looking through the mailing
list archive, I have found an email which said that XFS will *not* work for
the XFS cache.  Which is correct?  Can I still use XFS for the main XFS data
store and perhaps just use something else (like ext3) for the cache area?  Is
this a bug that will be fixed or just an incompatibility with XFS?

Thanks!


-- 
--John Gruenenfelder    Research Assistant, Steward Observatory, U of Arizona
                        johng@as.arizona.edu
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